“I have no intention of letting you flirt with me,” said Valdobia calmly. “My flirting days are over. I shall remain the best of your friends until you love me or send me to the other end of the world.”
“Well, don’t become serious and spoil everything.”
“I shall not lose my head, if that is what you mean,” he said drily. “I find the present state of affairs very pleasant. Let us overtake the others and go for a drive.”
XXXV
“WELL,” said Ora, when she and Ida had returned to the hotel to dress for dinner, “did you have a queer feeling when you were prowling through those dim old rooms, furnished three or four hundred years ago, and the scene of all sorts of romance and tragedy?”
“I had a queer feeling all right. Had visions of rheumatism, sciatica, pneumonia, and a red nose for a week. I suppose those wonderful velvet gowns they wore—in pictures, anyhow—were padded inside, and they slept in them; didn’t take them off all winter. If I lived in one of those palaces today I’d surely lose all my good American habits.”
“Didn’t you have any haunting sense of mystery—of having been there before?”
“Nixie! No wonder I murdered if I ever was. However,” she added thoughtfully, “there’s no telling what I might have felt if they’d had a furnace in the house. There was something wonderful about it, all right—being in those musty old rooms, that fairly smelt of the past. I guess they’ll haunt me as some of those Roman palaces have that are not shown to the public. But don’t put weird ideas into my head, Ora. They don’t gee with Butte. The severely practical is my lay.”
“Don’t you think there could be romance and tragedy in Butte?”
“Oh, plenty of shooting, if you mean that; and mixing-up. But people don’t stay jealous long enough to get real tragic about it; they just get a divorce. We’ve improved on daggers and poisoned bowls and rings, and the rest of it. Good old Butte!”